of it, for I knew no better. I marched away in a new uniform with the
band playing and the flags snapping. And on the little old farm my
father gave me I left a nineteen-year-old wife with my one-year-old
baby.

"Next door to that wife and baby of mine lived a man who did not
believe in war, a man who, even when conscription came and he was
called, refused to go to war. He hired a substitute and stayed at
home. And for that Green Valley has marked that man a coward and every
year sits in judgment upon him.

"Yet the man who would not go to war stayed at home to plough my fields
and plant them. He it was who saw to it that that wife of mine and the
wives of other war-mad boys did not want for bread. He stayed at home
here and minded his business and ours as well. He wrote letters and
got news for our women when they got to fretting too hard. He
harvested our crops, tended our stock, and mended our fences because he
is so made that he cannot bear to see things wasted, neglected, ruined.

"As a soldier that man was worthless, for the business of a soldier is
to kill, to burn, to waste, to maim. He knew that and he knew that
being what he was he could serve his country better doing the things he
liked and believed in.

"I came out of that war a physical wreck but with a heart purified. I
saw such a hell of evil, such destruction, such misery that to-day I am
a doctor and a planter of trees. When I saw men torn to rags and
lovely strips of woodland ripped to splintered ugliness I vowed that if
I ever came through that madness I would make amends. I swore I would
go through the world mending things. So terribly did those war horrors